Scooby-Doo! Jinx at the Sphinx

The Learning Company

Ages 5 to 10

Scooby-Doo! Jinx at the Sphinx is an exploration mystery. The CD opens with Velma's Egyptologist sister, Thelma, exploring a dark tomb. Suddenly, her lantern is knocked to the ground, and the tomb grows dark. Cut to the outside, where who should be driving up to the Great Pyramid, but our intrepid heroes! They discover she is missing, and with the user's help, set out to find her.

Educational Value

Like most games of this genre, the educational focus is largely limited to the need for some logic and deductive reasoning, combined with a sense of spatial awareness and memory. In Jinx at the Sphinx, this is augmented by the inclusion of various factoids, e.g. what an Egyptologist does, what the various artifacts found in tombs were for, etc.

Kid Appeal

Jinx at the Sphinx has wonderful, Saturday morning TV quality animation. And the characters are all familiar and lovable (well, at least to Scooby fans!). However, once again, our kid testers found this program to be very difficult to solve. In fact, even an 11 year-old tester said, "this is too hard -- you try it!" This, even when the program was set at the easiest of the three difficulty levels.

Ease of Use / Install

The program installed with only a modicum of difficulty. Basic installation is simple, but the program also offers to install the Adobe Acrobat reader, and QuickTime5. The latter offers a number of options that may prove difficult to understand for the typical home computer user.

Program navigation is intuitive -- the problem is in finding the clues that enable the rescuers to go where they want to go!

Best for... / Bottom-Line

Scooby-Doo! Jinx at the Sphinx is a nicely animated mystery adventure, with a good storyline, and popular characters. However, our kid testers felt it was too hard, especially for youngsters at the lowest end of the targeted age range. be prepared to offer some guideance.